The Single Best Article (So Far) on the Hamas-Israel War

It's by perhaps Israel's best national security journalist, Haviv Rettig Gur:

Theories abound about Hamas's reasons for the assault. Many suggested it was an Iranian-ordered disruption of Israeli-Saudi normalization. Others focused on internal Palestinian politics and suggested Hamas was positioning itself, even at the cost of an inevitable and crushing Israeli retaliation, as the unquestioned leader of the Palestinian struggle after Mahmoud Abbas's death. Still others said the reasons were simpler: The two Hamas leaders in Gaza who prepared and launched the operation were military chief Muhammad Deif and political head Yahye Sinwar. The first lost his family to an Israeli airstrike aimed at him, the second sat for 22 years in an Israeli prison. Neither needed an overwrought geopolitical rationale to piece together such an operation.

There is probably some truth in all these theories. All make sense. But none are how Hamas itself explained the operation in real-time.

Here lies a part of Palestinian thinking and discourse that many of Palestine's Western defenders ignore, both because it's a hard sell to Western audiences and because they don't really understand it themselves. Palestinian "resistance," as conceived by Hamas, is about much more than settlements, occupation or the Green Line. A larger theory of Islamic renewal is at work.

As he announced the start of Saturday's attack, Hamas military commander Deif said it was meant to disrupt a planned Israeli demolition of the Al-Aqsa Mosque. And when Hamas political chief Ismail Haniyeh called on Saturday for "every Muslim everywhere and all the free people of the world to stand in this just battle in defense of Al-Aqsa and the Prophet's mission," he meant just that, that the fight was over holy things, over Islam's redemptive promise.

This reclamation of Islamic dignity through the ultimate defeat of the Jews occupies a great deal of Hamas's political thought, permeates its rhetoric and profoundly shapes its thinking about Israeli Jews and its strategy in facing Israel. Israel is more than a mere occupier or oppressor in this narrative, it is a rebellion against God and the divinely ordained trajectory of history. And by showing Israelis in their weakness, the thinking goes, Israelis are somehow actually made weak. Redemption requires only the faith of its believers to be fulfilled, and seeing is believing….

Israelis can handle humiliation; they are less moved by the politics of honor than are their enemies. But these heirs of a collective memory forged in the fires of the 20th century cannot handle the experience of defenselessness Hamas has imposed on them. Hamas seemed to do everything possible to shift Israeli psychology from a comfortable faith in their own strength to a sense of dire vulnerability.

And it will soon learn the scale of that miscalculation. A strong Israel may tolerate a belligerent Hamas on its border; a weaker one cannot. A safe Israel can spend much time and resources worrying about the humanitarian fallout from a Gaza ground war; a more vulnerable Israel cannot.

A wounded, weakened Israel is a fiercer Israel.

Hamas was once a tolerable threat. It just made itself an intolerable one, all while convincing Israelis they are too vulnerable and weak to respond with the old restraint.

Read the whole thing.